It took me about a year to turn “transparency” from a word with nasty connotations to a word with positive ones. The internet gives a great new landscape for transparency. Here are a few places newspapers could start:
Create an index of your corrections that include the correction made and a link to the original article […]
The L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune announce a combined 250 or so cuts in the newsroom. The Denver Post (my employer) announced a buyout of up to 37. The numbers don’t give online much of a chance to bail newspapers out. Will desperate newspapers continue their superficial, trend-jumping approach to the internet? Will they hunker […]
The trib launched a community site today, triblocal.com. It looks like what a newspaper thinks would work for the model of community participation, and in the write-up the Tribune gives the site they mention TribLocal takes its cues from YourHub. The article also includes choice phrases like “taking a tentative step into a brave new […]
Newspapers don’t come with a manual. They never have. They’re simple, right? Maybe, but this “no need to explain” thing is turning into a problem online, and, sometimes in print.
Without a voice from the newspaper giving advice to the reader on how to use the newspaper, each reader gets to figure it out on […]
The answer: it varies. The problem is it varies a lot.
I was in the middle of writing a guide on writing a guide for online news content (how meta) when this came across the radar:
The editor of the Greensboro N.C. paper spent time interviewing loyal, 7-day subscribers to the paper last week. More than […]
Update: TBO.com’s Rusty Coats explains what happened: “the timing of this job appearing alongside layoff news is coincidental.” That information makes the meat of this post irrelevant. Which is too bad, because I already posted it. This is my first experience with the “shoot-first” blog practice, and if I keep on top of my stuff, […]
These are the links that got the most clicks in March (along with any notes I wrote on the link, or sometimes a quote from the linked article):
Lifehacker Code: Texter (Windows): “Text substitution app Texter saves you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases you define.”
How the world really shapes up: Maps […]
Plenty of online publications have those “most-popular” charts that measure the articles / blog posts that get the most clicks.
Poynter released part of an eyetrack study that says “Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.” That’s cool — and that opens the door to another type of most-popular metric. In […]